Eleven: Code Lyoko
by LabyrinthDweller
Summary: Eleven chapter story with colors for prompts. For the sci-fi cartoon "Code Lyoko".
1. Red

_Eleven one shots. Red Orange Yellow Green Blue Indigo Purple White Gray Brown Black. If you need any more guidance than that check out my as of now much more finished "Eleven" story. (I hope you like Don Bluth's Anastasia, though.)_

_Red is one of my favorite colors. It's a good thing I tend to love villains._

* * *

**Red**

When he was younger, Jeremy always thought it unfair that most villains and anti-heros were depicted with their main color as red. Sure, you'd always have at least one superhero whose main color was red, such as the Flash or Spider-Man, but more often than not a lot of the bad guys always had red about them. Maybe it was because he was growing up in a world that was letting go of the communists as a potential global enemy. Red may not have been his favorite color, but he still wondered why it had to be the characterization of evil.

True, he fainted whenever he saw blood until he was eleven years old (and granted, he had no proof that he still didn't faint from the sight of it) but even that wasn't enough justification for him. He always sent out a silent little word of sympathy to villains who had fallen into the trap of having red as their theme color. Red was not an evil color.

Or so he thought.

Xana changed his mind. It was gradual at first as he tenderly felt his way around, learning the super calculator's programs and dipping his toes into the vastness of the Lyoko network, pulling together programming codes as he met Aelita for the first time. Every now and then the red little symbol would appear, and he knew it was bad, but he'd always push it away to the back of his mind. It was just a little bug, nothing big. He could handle it, it wouldn't become a big disaster.

But oh, how wrong he was. And now, bringing a group of three other friends, three other warriors, to help him fight this battle, he saw the red symbol every day. In reality on his computer screens it flashed in its malevolence, in his dreams as it plagued him to sleeplessness.

And from then on, the very moment he had discovered the ultimate dangers of the secret super computer, the very moment that infernal eye blazed red on his computer screen, was the very moment that he hated red with all of his heart. Any shade of it; from crimson to vermillion to ruby suddenly had a loathsome glint to it. After months of fighting the computer only to be futile, everything possible that bore that color burned a hole in his brain if he stared at it. And if the color was in his vision, he _stared_ at it. Glared at it, even, lost in his boiling hatred for the cruel artificial intelligence. At one point Odd had to interrupt his thoughts in the middle of math class so that he could answer a question that the teacher had called on him for. _Odd_, of all people, had to bring him back to _math_ class, of all the classes. And when he jolted back to the here and now of Kadic Academy's school day, he broke his pencil. Snapped it in two. He earned a splinter from it, and had to go visit Yolanda.

When she removed the splinter it unveiled a bead of blood, red against the palm of his hand.

How could he _ever_ see that color as anything but the pure embodiment of evil? Whenever he saw it now, he always saw Xana's eye staring back at him, pulsating in its wickedness, waiting for its day of glory. In the tiny bead of blood on his hand he saw the eye laughing at him, mocking his incompetence as a human.

But the blood would heal. No color lasts forever. He closed his fingers over the wound, forming a fist. He no longer cared what Xana looked like. Xana was evil, that was it. Everything. Jeremy felt his red blood run through his veins, fueling him with determination.

What difference did it make.

He was going to defeat Xana.

That was the only thing he needed to think about.


	2. Orange

_Dunno, sometimes, because the show is geared for a younger audience, I suppose, I just feel like the weight of the situation isn't always pushed down as much as it could and sometimes should be. I mean...Yeah, Yumi saw the direness of the nuclear explosion in "Seeing is Believing" but..._

_And I mean sure, some episodes really pile it on high, especially in season 3 and the end of season 2, but I dunno...I just kinda felt that "Seeing is Believing" kinda missed the bullet with this one. Also it was set in the desert sector. Deserts are orange. In Lyoko. INSTANT MASTERPIECE._

_The dialogue is not precise at all. This is intentional._

_

* * *

_

**Orange**

"Well, what are we _supposed_ to do?" Odd whined, whipping his tail back and forth as he plopped his purple butt down on a rock in the Desert Sector, "Wait until Xana paves a yellow brick road to the tower for us? Sorry Jeremy but he's not gonna lead us to the Emerald City, here."

"I _know, _Odd, just...," Jeremy adjusted his glasses on his nose, pushing the headache to behind his temples, "The holomap says it's there, it _has_ to be there!"

"You sure it's not one of Xana's tricks?" Ulrich asked as Odd idly sharpened his claws against each other.

"It could be...," Jeremy muttered.

"I don't think Xana's powerful enough to hide towers," Aelita mused as she walked about the small oasis they were seated at, scanning the glossy water, "The pulsations lead here, the holomap says it's here, it's _got_ to be here!"

Ulrich gave a quiet scowl and unsheathed his sword, scratching at the ground and kicking up little dust particles around his feet. Odd picked up a fair-sized rock nearby him and scratched his claws on that, tossing it up and catching it every now and then. His purple paw engulfed the rock completely, neither of his friends could hold that rock with just one hand as easily as he could. Aelita watched his bored precision before she returned to pacing back and forth in front of the pool, trying to feel the pulsations beneath her tender, sensitive feet. They were so strong that they tingled up her shins, disappearing somewhere after the region of her knees. It absolutely had to be here. There was no hiding it in the desert sector; flat and orange with little cover, the desert sector didn't offer much concealment.

A frustrated cry from Jeremy's intercom interrupted the short silence.

"Come on you guys! If you don't find the tower _now_, the pylon's gonna explode!"

"Yeah? Why don't you virtualize yourself and give it a try?" Odd called back. Aelita shot him a glance.

"How much time do you think we have left?"

"Five, maybe seven minutes," Jeremy wailed, "You've got to try something soon!"

"Don't worry, Jer," Odd said, sweeping his tail against the orange sand and rock, "We're on it like Dr. Schreck and his next victim."

Both Ulrich and Aelita glared at him for his monotonous, nonchalant tone.

"Nu-cle-ar _explosion_," Ulrich sounded out for him, digging his sword into the ground. Odd sighed heavily and passed the rock from paw to paw.

"Come on...," Jeremy chewed nervously on his nails, "At this point it won't even matter that the authorities get here!"

"Calm down, Jeremy," Aelita soothed, though her voice was tense, "We'll find a way out of this. We always do."

He let out a garbled breath of exasperation and collapsed on the keyboard, his weak fingers clawing into his scalp, crumpling his blond hair. Glasses coming askew, he chewed on his bottom lip.

"I don't know, Aelita," he whispered as the pylon began to beep urgently in the background, searing a hole in his brain.

The three virtual forms stood there in the vast orangeness, hearing Jeremy's vague sobs in the distance. The desert, eerily quiet, closed in around them with its vastness and refusal to lead them to the tower. Just a hint, just a clue to where it was could save millions of lives, not just theirs as was per normal. Virtual heat rising off of the hot-colored plateaus blurred their vision, and in their waning time they stood or sat with a slouch, hoping that something would happen, their body and mind still not accepting nor comprehending the colossal catastrophe that was moments from being upon them.

Still, they thought. Xana would never destroy himself. Somehow, underground, the supercomputer would be protected from the blast. While they didn't know how much Jeremy was protected, they knew that their physical bodies (and Aelita's virtual one) were encased, enclosed, cocooned within the calculator's universe. They would be safe as long as Xana was safe, stuck in Lyoko.

And if they weren't stuck in Lyoko, if they were able to return to earth, would they even try? The radiation would blanket them like a damp cloth, seeping disease deep into their bones. They would have to wait years before they wished to emerge, and even then there was problems with that. For one, time could not be accurately calculated from Lyoko. For two, of the survivors of the nuclear explosion, those from the families, what would they think when their children eventually emerged completely unscathed? For Ulrich, that possibility wasn't very grand as his parents lived there with him in France, but Odd's family, his many sisters and two parents, they lived in Italy, and his other relatives lived across the globe in the United States. The guilt he would feel, knowing that all of his friends and their families excluding two were killed in an explosion, and to return to his own family with no scalds, wounds, sickness...It would be far more than just simply 'unethical.' It would be unlivable.

Odd snatched the rock from its mid-air spin and tossed it into the oasis pool. Where he expected a splash of digital water and a ripple in the reflection, a beam of white opened and shot upward, an eruption in the plains of orange. Confused, intrigued, and vaguely enraged, he reached his paw forward and dipped it in the water. What he felt was nothing wet, just simply air surrounded by white light as he broke the surface of Xana's trick.

"Son of a...," Odd whispered in awe and anger, "It's here! The tower is here! There's no water there, Xana fooled us!"

Ulrich and Aelita looked over. Jeremy looked up from the keyboard and fixed his glasses back on his soft nose.

"_That's_ where the tower is!" Odd proclaimed as he stood up, "Come on, let's go!"

Bending his knees, he dove into the illusion and folded his legs underneath him in a canon ball as he fell to the plateau below, followed closely by Ulrich and Aelita. There, glaring as a fiery red pillar in the sea of orange, was the activated tower.

"_Yes!_" Odd whooped as he leaped into the air, miscalculated his jump, and landed on his rear. Undeterred, he raised his fist and continued to shout, "Give it up for Odd! No one can fool these cat's eyes! Hahaha! Take that Xana, score one for the good guys!"

"Eat sand, Odd," Ulrich interrupted, drawing his sabre as he eyed down the two krabs guarding the tower, "Some of us have work to do."


	3. Yellow

_I thought up of this last night. Have to admit, Yellow had me stumped for a while. Until I remember all this "Don't tell me you're scared" stuff that happened during the XANA Awakens episodes. Heh._

_I had fun when I came up with the ultimate insult for Sissy._

* * *

**Yellow**

Uh, that electric ball of flying death in the gym? That was bad. He'd have to check in Belpois with that one, but in the meantime he should probably shake the Japanese girl he was practicing martial arts with. Struggling to sound like he wasn't trying to push her off too roughly, he lightly suggested that maybe she could go hide out with her friends for a while.

"I don't...have any friends," she replied through gritted teeth.

Oh.

Ulrich peeked out of the locker door to see the electric ball of death coming closer, straight for them. During their tiff Ulrich had figured that this girl, Yumi, was it? He had figured that she was impossibly stubborn, and if she didn't have any friends...well...

He glanced back at her. She could fight, maybe even better than he could. Shrugging as he grabbed her wrist and tore away from the door to the tunnel to the sewers, he figured that Belpois would forgive him later. After all, Sissy knew everything that was going on with this virtual whatsits, and you couldn't go much more wrong than _Sissy_.

To make matters worse, she was questioning everything he said to Belpois over the cell phone. He...probably should've waited to make that call because he realized she really _was _as stubborn as a mule then. Nevertheless, he breathlessly explained everything Belpois was doing at the moment; you know, dragging them into a virtual war, having them suffering over the consequences over this fake virtual girl with a personality on a supercomputer located at the abandoned factory not twenty minutes away from there. Yeah. Makes sense. Makes perfect, lunatic sense.

"Hey...who's that girl?" Jeremy Belpois questioned him as they collided in the sewers. Ulrich had a brief flash of feeling where he wanted to straight-out punch Belpois, but he subsided.

"Her name's Yumi. She was with me when I was attacked, and she can fight so I thought—,"

"Okay okay, later, we gotta go," Belpois interrupted before he zipped off faster than Ulrich could ever think he could go. So much for introductions, anyways.

Yumi was fast, and easily almost overcame all three of them though she had a late start. She wasn't even out of breath when they got to the large dangling wires that they used to leap over the _incredibly deep chasm_ down to the factory that made Ulrich's stomach turn upside down. Part of Ulrich wished she was out of breath.

"Don't tell me you're _scared_!" she mocked him as she grabbed the nearest wire and slid down it. Ulrich narrowed his eyes in a very practiced glare, and grabbed the wire without another word. Scared? Chicken? Yellow-bellied? Ulrich? Never. He just...had a condition, that's all. Just a condition with heights.

He stumbled on the landing and nearly fell, but he was able to pick himself up before Yumi noticed. Good, good. He'd like to keep his vertigo a secret, especially from somebody as cocky as her. She still beat him to the elevator though, and that in itself did nothing to lessen his locked glare on her. He was starting to second-guess his decision to bring her into this, but her wondrous and confused expression satisfied him enough that he wasn't entirely regretting it so far. Plus, it wouldn't kill them to have a girl on the team anyways. It was made up of mostly guys anyways.

And yes, guys included Sissy. _Zing!_

Ulrich stifled both his laugh and his groan. What was he turning into, his pea-brained roommate?

Yumi asked Belpois a question about whoever Maya was, but he simply smiled and said she was going to meet her. Ulrich smirked at her and offered no other clarification. This earned him a sufficient glare from her, and he kept the smirk. As long as she was completely bothered by it, then it was better than gold in his books.

"This story of yours is _pure_ science fiction." she dismissed as she stood in the scanner room.

"Well...yeah," Ulrich had to admit that, "Except it's _for real_."

She frowned at the both of them, Ulrich and his full of crap roommate. Oh well. She'll see soon enough. Despite himself, Ulrich winked deviously at Odd, who bowed and pranced into the nearest scanner. Ulrich too stepped into one, and stared her square in the eyes.

"Don't tell me you're _scared_." he smiled victoriously at her. She wrinkled up her nose, miffed, but before she could bite back the scanner doors closed and filled with a golden light.

He knew she wasn't scared, or a chicken, or yellow-bellied. He just believed that things would run a lot more smoothly with her around, and he was willing to keep her over everyone else in the group.


End file.
